Monthly archives for October, 2013

He was known as a genius. Then a madman. Then a historic relic of Hollywood’s Golden Age. He was a director and an actor. He was unique.

Who was he?

Next week Joe is beginning a film series in Tucson, Az. —What makes a classic movie classic? If you’re in Tucson please check it out. If you have friends in Tucson please alert them. The discussion and screening will be held at Makerhouse in downtown Tucson.

For the first film in the series Joe has chosen Sunset Boulevard. It stars William Holden and Gloria Swanson. We’ve discussed the film in many previous entries, but today we want to highlight the third, and often overlooked star, Erich von Stroheim (left in the photo above)

The von Stroheim story is long and complicated but we’ll try and simplify things. He is now considered, in short, right up there with D.W. Griffith and Orson Welles in the ranks of Hollywood’s most independent and gifted iconoclasts. And, as with Griffith and Welles, the strength of his artistic personality engendered strong opinions in studio front offices, mostly negative.

Born in Vienna (as Erich Oswald Stroheim; the “von” came later) in 1885, von Stroheim emigrated to the U.S. in 1906, and found himself in Hollywood at the beginning of World War I. Interestingly, he latched on to Griffith, serving as the great man’s assistant and as an actor in bit parts in Birth of A Nation and Intolerance.

Never concealing his ambition to be a director, von Stroheim convinced Universal Pictures mogul Carl Laemmle to let him take on the direction of his own screenplay (with a part for himself as Lt. Erich von Steuben, a prototype of the fastidious, strong hearted military man that von Stroheim later played to perfection). The picture was 1919’s BlindHusbands, and two more Universal silents followed under von Stroheim’s baton.

Working for Universal at the time was Irving Thalberg, an ambitious boy-genius producer who later cut a huge swath as production chief at MGM. Thalberg rode von Stroheim hard, regarding him as wildly profligate from an economic standpoint because his films invariably went way over schedule and over budget. Thalberg viewed von Stroheim as a director who had to be closely controlled.

Thalberg’s view was challenged some five decades later by none other than Welles, who asserted that the producer destroyed von Stroheim, as a man and as an artist.

And von Stroheim at that moment was , I think, demonstrably the most gifted director in Hollywood. Von Stroheim was the greatest argument against the producer. He was so clearly a genius, and so clearly should have been left alone — no matter what crazy thing he did.

Welles also claimed that von Stroheim’s reputation for excess, especially in production budgets, was over-exaggerated. I looked up von Stroheim, the budgets of his movies (in the Universal Pictures archives while making Touch of Evil at the studio). They weren’t that high. The idea that he was so extravagant was nonsense.

No question that von Stroheim’s films broke the mold. The original version of Greed, his 1923 adaptation of Frank Norris’ novel McTeague, originally ran some 10 hours. It was perhaps the most injudiciously ambitious film ever made, observes British writer-critic DavidThomson. The picture also ranks right up there with the very best silent films to come out of Hollywood.

von Stroheim and Swanson worked together in 1928’s Queen Kelly, financed by her lover at the time (JFK’s dad, Joseph Kennedy). The rest of the director’s career (von Stroheim died in 1957) was spent as an actor, shuttling between Hollywood and Europe.

In 1936, he costarred in Jean Renoir’s memorable anti-war film, La Grande Illusion, as the German officer of noble background, Von Rauffenstein. In Billy Wilder’sFive Graves to Cairo he portrayed Rommel; in SunsetBoulevard, he triumphs as Swanson’s butler, ex-director and ex-husband, who famously coaxes her down those stairs and into her final closeup.

Did 1950’s Sunset Boulevard revive Stroheim’s career?

Only in terms of Hollywood, said Welles. In America it seemed as though he’d been reclaimed from obscurity, when the reality was he was coming from continuing stardom in France. But the success of ‘Sunset Boulevard’ meant nothing to him because it was Swanson’s picture, and Billy Wilder’s — compared to what he was getting in France.

Not only has House of Wax, his signature Fifties 3D horror movie, just been reissued on Blu-ray DVD in spiffy style by Warner Home Video, but Turner Classic Movies has selected the actor as its October “star of the month.” The two events are probably commercially linked, but so what? (October also happens to mark the 20th anniversary of Price’s death of lung cancer in 1993.)

Today, we pile on with our selection of Price as our Star of the Week. Put us down as longtime fans within the career limits of what the actor set for himself.

Price was a mini-man-for-all-seasons, an art and antiques aficionado, gourmet cook, author, art adviser to Sears Roebuck, television personality and voracious bon vivant. He married three times, the last to actress Coral Browne. Still, rumors of Price’s bisexuality made the rounds of Hollywood until his death.

What matters to us is how much we have enjoyed his slightly tongue-in-cheek performances in a wide range of films, including, of course, those countless horror outings in the Sixties and Seventies for producer-director Roger Corman and for the aggressively exploitational American International Pictures. These films are not to everyone’s taste (see comment by Orson Welles below) but we like ’em.

Frank actually recalls seeing House of Wax at a first run theater shortly after the film’s opening on April 10, 1953 at New York City’s Paramount Theater. He claims to never have forgotten the experience.

The cast includes FrankLovejoy, Phyllis Kirk and a young Charles Buchinsky (to blossom later as Charles Bronson). Dave Kehr, video columnist for The New YorkTimes, notes that House of Wax director Andre de Toth was “blind in one eye, and couldn’t see the effects he was creating.”

Nonetheless, the Warner Bros. movie — a remake of 1933’s Mystery of the Wax Museum — turned out to be the biggest 3D box office hit of the decade, inspiring the inevitable rush of subsequent 3D titles from other studios. Price plays a put-upon sculptor unhinged when his wax museum is destroyed.

Notes Kehr: Price is able to balance menace with vulnerability, turning the deranged artist — his face horribly disfigure, via some highly creative makeup by George Bau — into a victim as much as a villain….Price adds an oddly effete, foppish quality to the characterization, influenced perhaps by Clifton Webb, with whom Price had appeared in Otto Preminger’s 1944 ‘Laura.’

Price would play variations on this character through the end of his career.

That career actually began in the late Thirties. Price, born in 1911 in St. Louis, Mo., studied art history at Yale, before appearing in London and Broadway stage productions including The Shoemaker’s Holiday and Heartbreak House, both staged by Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater. His first Hollywood screen assignments were heavily in costume dramas such as 1939’s The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex.

We especially appreciate Price’s performances in two very different movies. In SamFuller’s 1950 period title, The Baron of Arizona, the actor plays a land grabbing 19th century scoundrel who almost pulls off a takeover of the entire state of Arizona. In the nour-ish 1951 His Kind of Woman — directed by John Farrow with a superb cast including RobertMitchum, Tim Holt, Jane Russell, Raymond Burr and Charles McGraw — Price turns in a near perfect performance as a ham actor inadvertently caught up in an action thriller.

In his legitimate theater days, Price took himself very seriously, and believed he was an actor of sufficient ability to earn shots at leading Shakspearean roles such as Hamlet. As quoted in the newly published Orson Welles and Roger Hill: A Friendship in Three Acts by Todd Tarbox, Welles said he felt Price was “very bitter against me” because he didn’t get those big parts.

He thinks I destroyed his entire career. I don’t think he felt this way until later in his life when he had to find a reason why he was still making terrible horror movies at the age of sixty.

Ok, Orson Welles fans. Time to find out how you did on our Monday quiz.

(To check out our best effort to stump you, scroll down to the 10 questions covered below in ORSON WELLES — The Monday Quiz, The Questions.)

And, it’s also time to re-plug the publication of a brand new book covering Welles’ early life, and documenting as well his most consistent lifelong personal association captured in a series of fascinating conversations recorded over many years.

This well illustrated book includes many rare photos of Welles as a young student, and covering the early days of his stage career. We’ll be getting into more detail in subsequent blogs but suffice to say that Tarbox’ book is the inspiration of today’s quiz.

Without further ado, here are the correct answers:

1) At the age of 11, two years after his mother died, Welles arrived in Woodstock, Illinois, the site of the Todd School For Boys. The year was 1926. There began a lifetime friendship with the school’s headmaster, Roger Hill. Welles was born in Kenosha Wisconsin, just over the Illinois border. His father, Richard Welles, an inventor, had separated from his pianist-artist mother, Beatrice Ives, and his guardian, Dr. Maurice Bernstein, assigned the young Orson to Todd. It was an excellent choice.

2)False. Welles was a smarty even back then, recording an IQ of 185 on the Stanford-Binet test administered at Todd. (“Genius” level was 140 and above.)

3)False. Whatever he thought of other studio bosses, Welles much admired 20th Century Fox’s Darryl Zanuck, eulogizing him as a “legendary tycoon” and “a friend” at Zanuck’s memorial service.

4)False. Welles had no intention then or ever of becoming a Roman Catholic. Welles figured he was “the first real star” to visit then then Pope Pius XII (born Eugenio Pacelli) after World War II. “He had dry hands like a lizard and he held my hand for forty minutes while we talked, and all his questions revolved around Hollywood gossip.”

5) Welles much admired Pope John Paul II, the target of two assassination attempts, one seriously wounding him. Welles had a soft spot since the Pope (born Karol Wojtyla in Poland) “was a professional actor and something of a bohemian before he took his Holy Orders.” Said Welles, “I think his visit with his assassin was very touching…He went to the prison in Rome…and spent an hour with the man who tried to kill him. They just held on to each other and talked as though they were loving brothers.”

6) Kiki, a French poodle. Welles adored her. “She complicates and renders my life more expensive every day. But, I must keep her close because she’s just a little thing that depends so totally on me,” said Welles. Kiki was given to nipping waiters in restaurants and, on occasion, movie star patrons including Zsa Zsa Gabor.

7) False. Welles told Hill he was out of work as a director for for almost four years, not a full decade. (His next assignment was 1946’s The Stranger, which he directed and costarred with Loretta Young — pictured above — and Edward G. Robinson).

8) False.Vincent Price whispered to Welles during a tv talk show commercial break that “Isn’t it wonderful, here we are together, the two most wonderful voices in the American Theatre.” But Welles thought the remark was presumptuously hilarious. Welles figured that Price “had to find a reason why he was still making terrible horror movies at the age of sixty.”

9) Perhaps true, perhaps false. No way of knowing. But it is true that Welles said this about Charlie Chaplin’s appendage: “I have always admired one thing about Chaplin, who was famous in Hollywood for having the smallest penis in show business. Then he went away and married and had eight children after he was well into middle age, which must have silenced a lot of scurrilous laughter in the locker room.”

10. False. Although he said Rita Hayworth would “have one or two martinis and she was off,” Welles said he never thought his ex-wife was an alcoholic. “I knew she was a psychotic….She used to fly into these rages, never at me, never once, always at (Columbia boss) Harry Cohn or her father or her mother or her mother. She would break all the furniture and she’d get in a car…and drive up the hills suicidally. Terrible, terrible nights. And I just saw this lovely girl destroying herself.”

And, to be honest, it’s also time to plug the publication of a brand new book covering Welles’ early life, and documenting as well his most consistent lifelong personal association as expressed in a host of fascinating conversations recorded over many years.

This well illustrated book includes many rare photos of Welles as a young student, and covering the early days of his stage career. We’ll be getting into more detail in subsequent blogs but suffice to say that Tarbox’ book is the inspiration of today’s quiz.

4) Question: In another conversation, Welles mentioned that he had a meeting in Rome with Pope Pius XII shortly after the conclusion of World War II. It was because Welles wanted to convert to Catholicism. True or false?

5) Question: Which recent Pope was Welles’ favorite and why? (Hint: he was a former actor.)

6) Question: In a conversation quote in the new book, Welles confesses his intense attachment to his dog. What was the canine’s name, and what was the breed?

7) Question: After directing The Magnificent Ambersons in 1942(following his Citizen Kane), Wells couldn’t find work as a director for nearly a decade. True or false?

8) Question: Welles said some very flattering things about Vincent Price (cable channel TCM’s “star of the month”). Was it because Price considered his and Welles’ voices the “most wonderful” in American Theatre?” True or false?

9) Question: In conversation, Welles mentions in passing that Charlie Chaplin was famous in Hollywood for having the smallest penis in show business. Was that true (the statement, we mean)?

10) In one of the book’s conversation, Welles comes clean about living with former wife, Rita Hayworth and coping with her alcoholism? True or false?

Today more pictures and memories from still photographer John Lot who worked from the 1940s on in Hollywood. That’s Ann Blyth, of course, getting into John’s auto.

John continues telling us a little more about his career: After the four years working for Consolidated Film Industries, I was hired by Byron Haskin, ASC, and head of the Warner Bros. Special Effects Department on Stage 5 in Burbank.

Since this was the largest such department in the movie business, I was able to work with some of the top cinematographers in the special effects field, such as ASC fellows Edwin DuPar, Hans Koenekamp and Warren Lynch.

And John is still fascinated by the work of the first art director he worked with Anton Grot.–It’s been really hard to find information on Grot, but I did come across a blog which features several of his drawings. As far as I can tell, most of them were done for ‘Captain Blood,’ but it looks like at least one was for ‘Mildred Pierce,’ and the last one is probably for ‘Elizabeth and Esse’ or ‘The Sea Hawk’ (the two films share a number of sets).

Grot won five Academy Awards for Art Direction, for Svengali, Anthony Adverse, The Life of Emile Zola, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex and The Sea Hawk.

John concludes: I have been taking still pictures alongside those working making motion pictures. I believe that making a good movie and taking a good photograph go together. I like to share my experiences with others and what better way than to let you see with your own eyes my pictures and share my capturedmemories.

Recently we received a note from photographer John Lot who happened upon one of our older blogs about Joan Crawford and her co-star in Mildred Pierce,Ann Blyth. We asked John to share some of his photos and reminiscences about Ann.

Here’s John:

I had been interested in art director Anton Grot’s work for a while. He worked on many films with MichaelCurtiz, and is credited on numerous other Warner features in the thirties and forties. One of my first jobs was with Anton Grot on the film set of ‘Mildred Pierce.’ I was hired as a set stills photographer.

I would take still shots of the film set construction as it went up. It was being built on at the old Warner Bros. Studio backlot on Sunset Boulevard. At the time I still had a job working as a darkroom assistant on Sunset Boulevard for Consolidated Film Industries, where I would continue to work for the next four years.

I first made the acquaintance of Ann Blyth on the set of the film. It was Anton Grot that called Ann over and introduced me to her. Warner Bros had borrowed Ann for this film.

What was so special about Ann? Well, she was just a nice person who always had a warm smile and a pleasant word. She exuded maternal compassion and was always willing to listen to anyone’s tales of woe (including mine).

John reminds us that in those days members of the film crew did not fraternize with the actors– that was the golden rule.

But, obviously certain stars, like Crawford and Blyth did not subscribe to that way of thinking. Ann and John became friends.

John tells us: It was later that year, 1945, while filming ‘Danger Signal’ that Ann had a serious accident. During filming she suffered a broken back while sledding. It all happened while she was on a brief vacation in Snow Valley 14 miles from Lake Arrowhead.

It was Joan Crawford who let Ann swim in her pool. Ann and I would go there all the time to swim and exercise. I would push her around in that wheelchair day after day and I would take Ann over to Joan Crawford’s in my car.

She said Crawford was always gracious, generous, a supportive actress who understood that this was a big chance for Ann. She wanted the film to work and she wanted Ann to do well.

Thanks John. We’ll have more of John’s recollections and photos tomorrow. Meanwhile readers can check out John’s blog by clicking here.

We recently ran a shot of him sans toupee, dining with fellow actor Adolphe Menjou. Had you recognized him (handsome devil, isn’t he)? Today’s photo of the guy is much more typical.

Charles Boyer, a country boy born 1899 in Figeac in France’s Cahors wine district, made his first movie (L’Homme du Large or roughly The Broad Shouldered Man) in 1920. But the time he finished his last picture in 1976, Vincente Minnelli’sA Matter of Time, Boyer was a renowned international star with some 90 film and tv credits under his belt.

No other personality from France had so reigned in Hollywood. Unlike Maurice Chevalier, slightly more than a decade his senior, Boyer did not flog the charming-French-scamp stereotype ad nauseum. Sure, he could and did play the romantic Gallic smoothie to perfection, but he also tackled a range of strongly dramatic parts often portraying vicious, unsympathetic characters.

He was a superb actor.

Boyer’s costar in Warner’s 1943 drama, The Constant Nymph, is Joan Fontaine, who rarely employed superlatives to describe other actors in her 1978 autobiography, No Bedof Roses. But read what she has to say about her costar:

Charles Boyer remains my favorite leading man, Charles, a brilliant actor in English and French, in theater or onscreen, was a kind, gentle, helpful actor. Brian (Aherne, her then husband) and I often saw him and his beautiful English wife, Pat Paterson, socially.

I found him a man of intellect, taste and discernment. He was unselfish, dedicated to his work. Above all, he cared about the quality of the film he was making, and, unlike most leading men I have worked with, the single exception being Fred Astaire, his first concern was the film, not himself.

Boyer costarred with classic Hollywood’s most notable leading ladies including Marlene Dietrich in 1936’s The Garden of Allah, as Hedy Lamarr’s continental opposite in 1938’s Algiers and as Napoleon opposite Greta Garbo in 1937’s Marie Walewska (or Conquest).

The actor was memorably paired with Ingrid Bergman in three films including, of course, George Cukor’s 1944 period drama, Gaslight, in which Boyer gives a bravura performance as a svelte London nasty determined to convince his young wife (Bergman) that she is insane.

The picture won Bergman a best actress Oscar and a best actor nomination for Boyer. It’s a movie to enjoy over and over, in other words, a classic.

In interviews year later, Bergman (another actress not easily given to costar praise) said: Charles Boyer was a splendid actor and one of the finest men I have ever worked with… ‘Gaslight’ was one of my favorite films and one of the greatest experiences of my life.

Boyer proved his versatility in his many roles, adapting when film noir came in the Forties and early Fifties. Check him out in Otto Preminger’s 1951 suspense drama with LindaDarnell, The Thirteenth Letter, in which Boyer portrays a revered doctor at a French Canadian hospital.

Boyer’s apparently kind old Dr. Laurent, who is actually vicious and insane.. (and) while his face moves in and out of the light cast by a swinging overhead lamp tells (a colleague, Michael Rennie), ‘Good and evil can change places like light and shadow,’ as noted in Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style.

Of his later films, Frank suggests Stavisky,Alain Renais’ 1974 period biography of a well-connected French swindler (Jean-Paul Belmondo) who undermined a French government in the early 1930’s. Boyer is moving as a tired, jaded aristocrat who has seen it all. The role of Baron Jean Raoul won the actor a “Special Mention For His Performance” citation at the Cannes Film Festival.

Remarkably for an internationally recognized movie star, Boyer married just once — to former actress Paterson, and the couple doted on their only son. Bergman recalls:

Charles brought his little son, Michael, who had been born during ‘Gaslight,’ to visit ‘The Arch of Triumph’ set. Michael was the most beautiful child, and looked just like his father. I was so happy for Charles and his wife, who were sublimely happy with their little boy.

It was many years later that I heard the story of the terrible tragedy….What I heard was that the young man fell madly in love with a girl who didn’t return his feelings. Tragically, there was a gun, and Michael shot himself.

Heartbroken, Charles and his wife moved to Geneva. When she was diagnosed with a brain tumor, they returned to America. She died, and a few days later (Boyer) took his own life. It happened Aug. 26, 1978 in Phoenix. Boyer was 78.

To repeat, we know that back in February we challenged you with our first official IngridBergman quiz (Know A Lot About Ingrid Bergman? published on Feb. 20with answers posted on Feb. 25).

But since we admire this great actress so, and are duly inspired by author CharlotteChandler’s 2007 biography, Ingrid Bergman: A Personal Biography (Simon & Schuster) — as well as the most welcome issue of The Criterion Collection’s new and very much improved DVD renderings of Stromboli (1950), Europe ’51 (1952) and most especially, Journey To Italy (1954), Bergman’s work directed by lover-husband Roberto Rossellini — we decided to come up another reader challenge with different and (slightly) tougher questions.

The latest Bergman quiz questions can be found on yesterday’s blog, Monday Quiz — INGRID BERGMAN Tougher This Time? Just scroll down and check out the 10 queries.

This time we adopted a true-false format to simplify things. You may not have known all the answers but we’re betting that you scored correctly on at least a few. Ok, here we go with those much-awaited answers:

1) False. Bergman regarded Casablanca pretty much as a big studio programmer of little potential and the part of Ilsa as undernourished and unchallenging. She was uncomfortable with the movie’s on-the-fly approach to its script, including its all-important ending. Years later she confessed, “Now, I understand. I was wrong.” Was she ever.

2) False. Bergman was personally very fond of Charles Boyer, and admired his work as an actor. It’s true that in 1946’s Arch of Triumph, Boyer, markedly shorter than Bergman, had to stand on a box during love scenes to compensate. “I was taller than Boyer, but he was such a great actor that as he played his part, he grew taller,” she said.

(Coming attractions: we’ll be devoting one of star-of-the-week blogs to this fascinating French actor in the coming week. Stay tuned.)

3) False. Bergman may have had her share of Hollywood lovers but her Casablanca costar wasn’t one of them. “The relationship between the two actors was considerably less passionate than what audiences saw on the screen,” writes Chandler. Bergman said she kissed Humphrey Bogart “but I never got to know him.”

4) False. After appearing in a little more than a handful of Hollywood films including Casablanca, For Whom The Bell Tolls, Gaslight, Spellbound and Notorious, Bergman was a top box office star. By 1946, she was Hollywood’s No. 1 female above-the-liner. She was BIG.

5) False. The 1939 David O. Zelznick version of Intermezzo, Bergman’s Hollywood debut, was based on the Swedish version she costarred in three years prior. Both versions are interesting in their own ways. No “ripoff” involved.

6) False. The aloof Garbo and the then shy star-on-the-rise Bergman met perhaps twice in their lifetimes. They were never friends. The two Swedes just didn’t care all that much for each other.

7) True. Bergman was deeply impressed by Rossellini’s signature film, Rome: Open City, as well as his Paisan, both released just after Italy was liberated at the end of World War II. Bergman was “thrilled” by both movies, and wished to know more about the person who created them. The rest is history. That’s them pictured above.

8) True. Although George Sanders wasn’t “badgered” by Rossellini as he was ignored by the director during the making of Journey To Italy — little rehearsal, lines invented at the last minute. Bergman recalled that Sanders “just broke down…this big, strong man, so sure of himself as an actor, crying like a child. He just couldn’t adjust to (Rossellini’s) method.” Ironically, Sanders gave what is perhaps a career-best performance in the movie.

9) False. Bergman was working on a stage production at the time she discovered the lump, but did not seek immediate medical attention. The cancer eventually spread and claimed her life on Aug. 29, 1982, her 67th birthday.

10) False. Bergman prepared an elaborate dish of her favorite crayfish. Alfred Hitchcock took one look, and declared it “disgusting.” A small steak, potato and salad were hastily rustled up and provided the director as a last minute substitute.

Yes, yes, we know that back in February, we challenged you with our first official IngridBergman quiz (Know A Lot About Ingrid Bergman?, published on Feb. 20 with answers posted on Feb. 25).

But since we admire this great actress so, and are duly inspired by author CharlotteChandler’s 2007 biography, Ingrid Bergman: A Personal Biography (Simon & Schuster) — as well as the most welcome issue of The Criterion Collection’s new and very much improved DVD renderings of Stromboli (1950), Europe ’51 (1952) and most especially, Journey To Italy (1954), Bergman’s work directed by lover-husband Roberto Rossellini — we decided to come up another reader challenge with different and (slightly) tougher questions.

To compensate, we have adopted a true-false format to simplify things. You may not know all the answers but we’re betting that you’ll score correctly on at least a few. Ok, here we go:

1) Question: The role of Ilsa in Casablanca was Bergman’s favorite movie part. True or false?

2) Question: Charles Boyer, Bergman’s costar in Gaslight and Arch of Triumph, deeply resented working with her because she privately derided his short stature by referring to the actor as “that little, French shrimp.” True or False?

3) Question: Bergman had many affairs with her male costars during her Hollywood years including a torrid fling with Casablanca costar Humphrey Bogart. True or False?

4) Question: Although she certainly had many fans, Bergman was never a top Hollywood star at the box office? True or false?

5) Question: Bergman’s Hollywood debut in 1939’s Intermezzo: A Love Story was a ripoff of a movie she had made before in her native Sweden. True or false?

6) Question: Fellow Swede Greta Garbo was introduced to Bergman early in the latter’s Hollywood career, and the two became lifelong friends. True or false?

7) Question: Her infamous romance with Italian director Rossellini began immediately after Bergman saw — and was struck by — two of his movies. True or false?

8) Question:George Sanders, Bergman’s costar in Journey To Italy, was literally reduced to tears by the dictatorial badgering he suffered at the hands of Rossellini during the movie’s production. True or false?

9) Question: When Bergman discovered a lump in her breast, Bergman immediately stopped working to receive medical attention. True or false?

10) Question: When Bergman cooked dinner for Alfred Hitchcock at her home outside Paris, the rotund director of of three of her most notable outings (1945’s Spellbound, 1946’s Notorious and 1949’s Under Capricorn) was thrilled, and called for seconds and thirds. True or false?

As you might have guessed from a cursory glance at our recent entries, a favorite mini-topic of our’s these days is favorite Western movie picks.

We’ve published at least a half dozen blogs on westerns (or “oaters” as they used to be called in the Hollywood trade press) involving Marlon Brando, Gregory Peck, John Wayne and, of course, Clint Eastwood.

We’ll have more on all this soon, but in the meantime we decided to broaden our base of opinion by including our resident BOOKS2MOVIES maven Larry Michie in the selection process.

Larry is often given to quirky surprises, and he doesn’t disappoint here. So which ARE his favorites? Here’s Larry:

I am going to be a bit eccentric about this one.

First off, without a doubt and forever, the Number One Western movie is SamPeckinpah’s ‘The Wild Bunch’ (1969).

Blood and gore from the very start of the movie, with children tormenting critters at the roadside as gunmen ride into town with obvious plans to rob a bank. The sheriff (or whatever he is), along with a crew of gunmen, is on an adjacent roof, and he can barely keep the literally-idiot gunmen from opening fire too soon.

There also is a town parade. There’s every opportunity for a bloodbath, and sure enough there is one.

William Holden(pictured above) and crew grab bags of ducats and dash out of town — but because the lawmen knew they were coming a torrent of firepower is pored out onto the street. All sorts of people are shot, terrified, etc. It is unleashed Hell and yet Holden and a few of his crew manage to grab the moneybags and thunder out of town as fast as they can. (Critics at the time were horrified by the movie’s violence. Little did they know what was coming. Ed.)

A posse pursues, but the desperadoes blow up a bridge and effectively get away safely. In the end, as they begin to divvy up the money, they find that the would-be bank was full of nothing but metal stamps.

Later there are confrontations with a Mexican troop, but the Wild Bunch get to a corrupt Mexican town where they have lots to drink, a choice of whores, and manage a fragile peace with the over-the-top Mexican honcho of the town. There were conflicts, of course, and eventually massive bloodshed.

The signature ending shows the rueful Robert Ryan (four years before he died of lung cancer) just outside the town, the only living survivor. Time to get on the horse and move.

That’s number one on my Oater Hit Parade.

As a change of pace, I really liked John Wayne with the perky little girl (Kim Darby) in ‘True Grit’ (also 1969). It is far from my favorite Western, but I regard it as a charming story.

Though I won’t provide additional favorites I will offer my “Number One Wished-for Western” just as a teaser: The magnificent novel Blood Meridian, by one of the world’s best writers, Cormac McCarthy.

The book is a wonderful, hideous, bloody, challenging novel about the Wild West, Mexico, extreme violence, Indian battles covered with gore, with some desperadoes almost as young as kids, and with brutality of all sorts — everything you could want in a Western. If you haven’t read it, give it a try.